When the news first emerged that a new committee had been set up to carry out a major reappraisal of the civil legal system, there came the traditional groans of protest from the plaintiffs' personal injury camp that we were having to face yet another period of uncertainty.

However, this pill was sweetened when it was learned that the committee was being led by one of our most radical and respected judges, Lord Woolf.Few of us who specialise in the field of personal injury would attempt to suggest that the current system is anything like perfect and, since the inception of his committee, we have been looking to Lord Woolf to build on its strengths whilst attacking its weaknesses.

The general reaction of practitioners, on hearing his initial thoughts at the November conference of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, was that in some areas his ideas would greatly improve the system but in others he was way off beam.Lord Woolf started by quoting from the review of personal injury cases recently carried out by Professor Hazel Genn, in which she found that a large proportion of cases had taken longer than four years and in some instances over six years to be resolved.This criticism is nothing new and is one of the prime reasons why personal injury work has undergone so much change over the past two to three years.

The general direction of many of those changes has been to encourage specialisation through the franchising and panel arrangements, to streamline the court process through a more 'cards on the table' approach, and to try to keep the non-specialists in line by a more rigorous attitude to delays.Lord Woolf came up with further ideas which, in general terms, fit in well with these earlier changes, such as the eradication in certain sorts of case of the need for discovery, the insistence that the defence be a fully pleaded document rather than a 'dead bat', and the idea that the length of trials be greatly reduced.One idea which was put forward was the suggestion that judges, and the courts generally, should take a more interventionist role.

This included the concept of the appointment by the court of independent court experts.The experience of personal injury lawyers is that where the courts have become more involved in individual cases, such interventions were almost invariably more of a hindrance than a help.

Without question almost every time the court is involved in a case this means delay, and this is a tool that the defendants use well in their favour.One of the main reasons for delay in a case is the tim e it takes to obtain a report from an expert.

Specialist lawyers are able to bring some pressure to bear on the expert to speed up the process, partly because the scale of their operations means they have the financial muscle to encourage greater speed but also because they have the machinery to send out regular reminders.

It is hard to see how the court would ever be in a position to sit on top of an expert to ensure the speedy production of a report, or would have the mechanisms, resources and time available to enable it to play this more interventionist role.The personal injury lawyer might be forgiven for being rather cynical about the idea that the courts could be used as a way of speeding cases along when, in the current system, court appointments are put in months ahead; the over listing of cases usually means that on the day there are long waiting periods before the gaining of an audience; defendants are allowed to use the court system to delay the eventual payment of damages; and the parties often have to wait around for hours on the day of trial for the court to become free.In the present system it is the claimant's lawyer who has to take on the role of forcing the pace of proceedings and the recent changes have largely, although by no means entirely, helped to ensure that this is reinforced.

Proposals for change need to build on this strength rather than undermine it and this particular idea of Lord Woolf is not one that I can see fulfilling this goal for mainstream personal injury work.

It may well be that such an idea may be of real benefit in more complex cases such as with medical negligence and group actions.There is no question but that the role of the courts needs to be altered.

I would suggest that we should see a time limit, in the region of 14 days, being placed on the length of time between the taking out of an application and it being heard; there being an appointment system where each application is given a specific time to start and a specific period; and that both be adhered to rigorously.

The trial itself could operate in a similar way.

Further, when orders are given, they should be 'unless orders' from the word go.

The burden should then be on the offending party to make an application to extend time beyond the given date and the courts should be wary of granting such applications.The suggestion was mooted by some experienced practitioners at the APIL conference that there might be a specialist personal injury court.

I do not see that as a major priority, not least because the judiciary clearly wants to downgrade personal injury work and a change along these lines would, in my view, assist them in continuing with the process by making the personal injury court into a tribunal.Lord Woolf has to be congratulated on the open way he has been conducting this civil justice review and a number of his ideas would fit well within the system that plaintiffs' lawyers would like to see.

However, whilst from the rarefied atmosphere of the Lords it may appear that the courts could be used in an interventionist way to run personal injury actions, those of us operating at the grassroots level see little prospect of this idea working.

Perhaps a couple of days spent out in the field would ensure that the committee's idealism was tinged with reality